Philip Larkin

 

Was Philip Larkin stifled by his job as a librarian? New research suggests he was rather dedicated

Stewart Mottram

Published: August 8, 2022 4.47pm BST

Named Britain’s greatest postwar writer by the Times in 2008, Philip Larkin remains justly celebrated as a wry observer of life’s routines, banalities and quiet poignancies. He was a writer who once spoke of poetry as “enhancing the everyday”.

Yet much of Larkin’s reputation as a great British poet rests on the widely-held assumption that Larkin would have been greater still were it not for the demands of his day job as a librarian at the University of Hull between 1955 and 1985. In truth, there is much in Larkin’s poems and letters to support the view that Larkin was a reluctant librarian.

Now, as we celebrate the centenary of Philip Larkin’s birth in 1922, new research at the University of Hull’s Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing reveals Larkin’s dedication for his day job as a librarian at the University of Hull.

The reluctant librarian?

“Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness,” Larkin writes in a published letter to his long-term companion, Monica Jones, soon after he arrives in Hull. “God, the people are awful,” (May 9 1955). Nine years later, in the poem Toads Revisited, Larkin finds solace in the soothing routines of his day job. However, he continues to moan to Monica in the early 60s about the “woundy dull” work dinners he is forced to attend (28 November 1963).

Larkin’s reputation as a reluctant librarian is today cast in bronze, by Martin Jennings’ in his statue of Larkin at Hull Paragon Railway Station. In it, the poet is seen dashing for a train to London and fretting, in lines from the The Whitsun Weddings, about being “late getting away” from work.

Yet, while there is evidence to suggest Larkin found his work as a librarian distracting and dull, we must guard against taking what he says in his poems and published letters at face value.

Larkin confesses, in an unpublished letter to Monica Jones, which now resides in Hull’s university archives, that “my remarks about myself are not very trustworthy”, and “are invariably designed to conceal rather than reveal” (June 1 1951).

This suggestion that Larkin’s private letters are not always reliable finds echoes in the words of Larkin’s contemporary, the Hull academic John Saville, whose correspondence with and about Larkin survives in the university archives. Writing to the Guardian in a letter published on October 20 1999, Saville notes the disjunction between the views Larkin expresses in “private letters” and his “courteous and helpful” demeanour as a librarian.

Saville draws on his working relationship with Larkin for three decades to argue that Andrew Motion, in his 1993 biography Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, “pays too little attention to Philip’s working life as a serious and conscientious librarian”.

Photo of library staff (October 1957) at the University of Hull. Larkin sits in the middle. Hull University, Author provided (no reuse)

New light on Larkin’s ‘day job’

New research at Hull’s Larkin Centre is beginning to corroborate this picture of Larkin as a dedicated librarian, drawing on little-known records in Hull’s university archives of Larkin at work. These include minutes of library committees, records of Larkin’s correspondence as a librarian, and interviews with Larkin for the University of Hull student newspaper, The Torchlight.

The Larkin we encounter in these archives is instead an energetic figure, posing for staff photos and even contributing a self-portrait for a library staff Christmas party in 1963. He was so proud of the library and its collections that he expresses genuine surprise at student criticism of the library in a November 1969 issue of The Torchlight.

“I was under the impression,” Larkin writes to the editor of Torchlight, “that the Library is the one thing in the University of Hull which its students can claim is better than in any other university of our age and size.”

It would seem Larkin was quite proud of the library at Hull and in his poetry, he expressed the importance and value of such institutions for everyone, particularly in the poem Library Ode:

New eyes each year
Find old books here,
And new books, too,
Old eyes renew;
So youth and age
Like ink and page
In this house join,
Minting new coin.

The views Larkin expresses in one poem or collection of letters, therefore, are not always consistent with the views he expresses in other contexts. No one poem, archive or collection of letters can give us direct access to Larkin “the man”.

In an interview for Torchlight in February 1961, Larkin was asked directly, “Do you feel you are two people?” “Reading your poetry,” the interviewer continues, “I get the impression that the poet thinks the librarian is in a rut: does the librarian want to get out of the rut?”

Larkin had written to Monica Jones just four years beforehand, on January 29 1957, to confess he was “playing the fool” as a librarian with “nothing to show for it” as a poet. But to the student reporter, Larkin’s reply was far more positive about his dual role as poet and librarian: “I’m not two people for tax purposes. And in fact the poet feels very grateful to the librarian. He keeps them both.”

THE CONVERSATION

Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin / Reviews

 

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  Letters to Monica 

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• Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin

  edited by Anthony Thwaite

  Faber, pp. 475

They were ‘soulmates’ according to people who knew both of them.

They were ‘soulmates’ according to people who knew both of them. The word has a double-edged quality; it may suggest that they got on well together because they presented such a problem to everyone else. Both Philip Larkin and Monica Jones found it difficult to suffer fools gladly, and in this collection of letters (ranging from 1946-84) from Larkin to his long-term companion and lover, the mean-spirited and misanthropic are given full rein.

Larkin met Jones in 1946, and they soon became lovers. (So much for sexual intercourse beginning in 1963). She was a flamboyant presence in the English Department of Leicester University, remaining a junior lecturer until her retirement in 1981. He went from university library to university library, ending up at Hull. They holidayed with one another; she put up with his occasional other mistresses; but only late in life did they move in together. Monica destroyed Philip’s diaries after his death in 1985, and went on living, somewhat chaotically, in his house in Hull until her own death in 2001. Most of these letters surfaced, in a terrible condition, long after Andrew Motion’s fine biography and Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the poet’s other letters.

Monica was the poet’s sounding-board about all sorts of matters. The first letters here show a familiar, guarded restraint —‘Oh dear! I do seem to have created a bad impression lately’ — but before much longer he is talking to her about anything and everything on his mind. Some letters are the sort of frank outpourings of rage (memorably about his neighbours’ taste in music) which no doubt the incinerated diaries were filled with. They were so much alike that Larkin once said to her that ‘what we have is a kind of homosexual relation, disguised.’

Unexpectedly, he does not give way much to the sorts of illiberal sentiments we know from other sources that he and Monica enjoyed sharing. The nearest to that is a line from a 1951 letter, thanking Monica for reminding him of Empire Day: ‘Queen’s [Belfast] flew a flag and I was nice to a nigger.’ In other respects, there was almost nothing he would not share with Monica.

The positive side of this is that Monica, quite clearly, is the person he talks to about literary matters, and the technique of writing. The comments on literature, both in individual cases and in general, are fascinating and insightful — for instance, his critic- ism of The Heart of the Matter for going against the fundamental nature of the novel:

The novel to me is the artform in which we show what happens in human life. ‘Miracles’ do not happen.

Often in these letters we see the first twinges of what would emerge much later as a poetic statement:

Of course, if one starts blaming one’s parents, well, one would never stop! Samuel Butler said that anyone who was still worrying about his parents at 35 was a fool, but he certainly didn’t forget them himself, and I think the influence they exert is enormous.

Twenty years later, more sharply, that would emerge as ‘This Be The Verse.’ Most acute is an utterly disillusioned consideration of the last line of ‘An Arundel Tomb’ — ‘what will survive of us is love’:

One might say ‘penicillin is stronger than death’, sometimes with fair truth, but ‘love is stronger than death’ reminds me of that slogan ‘Britain (or London) can take it’, which irritated me in the same way. It surely meant that people can stand being bombed as long as they aren’t bombed.

Larkin, on the whole, was not filled with the milk of human kindness, and Monica was not a correspondent for whom he needed to extend himself into charm, or even write about anything very obviously interesting. Anthony Thwaite has cut down a lot of letters, he says, concerning Larkin ‘changing his sheets, washing his sheets, washing his socks, mending his socks,’ and what had just happened in The Archers.

The result —though of course of great interest to Larkin scholars — is a definitely lowering book. It is amusing to try to find the least interesting subject Larkin thought worth setting down in a letter to Monica. For my money, the prize goes to a 1959 letter, which begins:

I have four rolls of pink toilet paper on my low table, more or less at my elbow, but their only significance is that I’ve been too lazy to put them away. Pink is a new departure for me — only just discovered Bronco (why Bronco? Talking Bronco) makes it.

This defiant drabness extends even to Larkin’s accounts of their erotic life:

You were looking out of my kitchen window, and let me tuck your skirt up round your waist to be admired. You were wearing the black nylon panties with the small hole in!

One rather admires a writer who finds such pleasure in such utterly grim vignettes, one devoted to the dogged transcript of the stuff of daily life — Barbara Pym comes to mind. Larkin’s interest in the small-scale and bathetic, which often possesses such warmth in the poetry, in his letters comes across as small-mindedness. A certain comic theme emerges with his recurrent complaints about his Christmas presents. In 1952 he writes:

Not much of a haul this Christmas! A laundry bag (asked for), a 10/6 book token, a second-hand tie, & a pair of expanding cufflinks enamelled in blue with large ‘P’s in cursive script on them. That’s all, that’s all, that’s all.

Their presents to us were miserable, average cost 10/3d. Mine were opulent, average cost 27/-.

Larkin, I think, is at his least likeable in his letters about Kingsley Amis. From this volume alone you might question whether they were friends at all. He complains about the chaos of the Amis house when he stays — not that surprising, with three small children at the time. He insists repeatedly, and implausibly, that the best jokes and scenes in Lucky Jim and That Uncertain Feeling were stolen from him — as if Larkin could ever have written a novel like Lucky Jim. And, recurrently, he gives way to an unworthy belief that Hilly, Amis’s wife, would have been much better off with almost anyone else. Ludicrously,

Hilly must regret marrying Kingsley so early when she sees her sister married to a respectable husband who will (very likely) go far. 

In a one-sided correspondence like this, there might be a risk that the unquoted correspondent emerges faintly. Not here. Monica’s personality is dauntingly clear in Larkin’s letters to her. Just how difficult she could be emerges strongly — a couple of quotations fromher letters to Larkin leaves no doubt of the venomous accuracy of Amis’s portrait of ‘Margaret’ in Lucky Jim. In other places, the full Lucky Jim horror of Monica’s histrionic behaviour emerges through things Larkin was obliged to say to her:

I really don’t see where the agony comes in, if you mean people would take [the poem ‘If My Darling’] as applying to you.

I’d even go so far as to make three rules: One, never say more than two sentences, or very rarely three, without waiting for an answer or comment from whoever you’re talking to. Two, abandon altogether your harsh didactic voice, & use only the soft musical one (except in special cases); & Three, don’t do more than glance at your interlocutor (wrong word?) once or twice when speaking. You’re getting a habit of boring your face up or round into the features of your listener — don’t do it! It’s most trying.

Who, reading this testimony from someone who undoubtedly loved her, can do anything but give thanks that they never dined with Monica Jones? The odd thing, which people have been wondering about ever since the Letters and Motio n’s Life were published, is that a poet so generous and warm in his published work could be so curmudgeonly in everyday life. I don’t suppose he was very good for Monica, and she was probably not all that good for him. Soulmates, indeed.

WRITTEN BY

PHILIP HENSHER

Philip Hensher is professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and the author of 11 novels including A Small Revolution in Germany.

THE SPECTATOR

 

Philip Larkin

What kind of man was Philip Larkin? Hull retrospective is a fresh look at the poet

ALEC CHARLES
Published: July 6, 2017 8.49am BST

Do the lives of poets matter? It’s a debate that has raged since the middle of last century. In Philip Larkin’s day, the scholarly advocates of New Criticism felt that the text itself, regardless of authorial intent or audience affect, was all that really counted.

But we’re surrounded by the paratext – material such as covers, blurbs, biographies and introductions, which surrounds any text. We’re steeped in literary knowledge impossible to ignore. Can we interpret the demise of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre without acknowledging the Brontës’ history of consumption? Can we read Keats in ignorance of his similar fate? And might we enjoy the poetry of Larkin innocent of any knowledge of the poet’s outmoded beliefs?

The University of Hull has just launched a major exhibition charting Larkin’s life, as part of Hull City of Culture 2017. This retrospective offers a measure of the man: his Beatrix Potter porcelains jostle for attention with his Billy Bunter books and his records (Handel, Dylan, Bechet, Holiday and the rest). His neckties, tattered and stained sit alongside his Grim Reaper cufflinks and his RSPCA pin. His D.H. Lawrence mug and matching T-shirt (in its original cellophane), his unwrapped packs of Christmas cards, a paperweight, a commemorative plate, his jazz journals and jazz catalogues. And there are oh-so-many books: How to Avoid Matrimony, Martin Amis’s Money, the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the four slim volumes of his own verse – and hundreds more texts, battered but beloved. All brought together, for all the world to see, in the place he once worked, the detritus of a half-lived life.

The show’s curator Anna Farthing told the BBC: “It’s incredible that somebody who had such a contradictory and conflicted world and life managed to produce art that was so clean and clear.”

Philip Larkin in 1961, with gin and tonic. Simon K, CC BY

Larkin’s poetry, though avowedly lucid, remains complex and conflicted. His attitudes to race, for example, maintained a precarious suspension between an inherited xenophobia (his father was a Nazi sympathiser) and a love of jazz. In All What Jazz, his collection of journalistic love-letters to the music which enriched his life, he supposed that slavery and segregation generated that music. The African-American, wrote Larkin “did not have the blues because he was naturally melancholy [but] because he was cheated and bullied and starved”. He warned that, if this oppression ended, its wonderful and strange fruit would perish too.

Larkin’s argument, though profoundly offensive, at least lacks hypocrisy. In his own life he appeared similarly determined to pursue (and enjoy) his miseries in order to provide an authentic foundation for the agonisingly slow processes of his art. This groundedness averted what he considered the pretensions of modernism. And so he was grudgingly content to spend 30 years running the university library at Hull – “it forces you to think about something other than yourself”, he told fellow poet John Betjeman in a 1964 documentary. It was good for him “as a poet”.

Miserable old so-and-so

Ten years earlier he’d lamented having let that “toad work squat on [his] life”. But by 1962 he’d come to see those daily labours as conferring meaning upon his existence: “Give me your arm, old toad; Help me down Cemetery Road.” As Andrew Motion suggests in his biography of the poet, Larkin seemed even to select his holiday destinations so as to enjoy own irritation at their discomforts and inconveniences: “As Larkin’s temper rose so his pleasure increased.”

Unveiling of a memorial to Larkin at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in 2016. John Stillwell/PA Archive/PA Images

But Larkin’s work (like Samuel Beckett’s) propagates redeeming ironies in its confrontations with the fear and loathing of everyday life, finding consolation in the commonality of its desperation, of that “sure extinction that we travel to”. We have far more in common than that which divides us. The value of this message is reinforced when echoed by this most unsentimental and divisive of literary voices: “What will survive of us is love.”

Larkin’s attitudes to women, meanwhile, seemed puerile, submissive, dismissive, adoring and sometimes aggressive. Yet he appears closer to Alfred Hitchcock than to Donald Trump. His work forces inner conflicts into the light of conscious scrutiny. It performs the opposite of the chauvinistic brag; he’s a constant voyeur, as once joyful and ashamed, into others’ sexual exploits: their “brilliant breaking of the bank” - “this,” he admits, “is paradise”.

Terry Eagleton once denounced Larkin as a “miserable old so-and-so who raised boredom, emptiness and futility to a fine art”. Yet Eagleton has also suggested that the progressive power of literature can run counter to the “overtly reactionary” intentions of its author.

Might we witness this in the fertile paradoxes which underpin Larkin’s verse? Might his playing out of such stresses illuminate contemporary cultural tensions? Such a re-revisionist approach might not only resurrect Larkin’s reputation, but see his work’s worth as founded upon its conflicted responses to his own hatreds and neuroses.

“Books are a load of crap”, Larkin wrote in his all-deprecating way. Yet his work demonstrates that literature’s value may lie in this very crappiness. Great poetry can be conflicted and inconsistent, can (as American poet Walt Whitman would say) contradict itself. The best sense, then, we may hope to find here would be just those words which are “not untrue and not unkind”. That may not be much, but it may also be enough.

THE CONVERSATION